Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to conferencing, and specifically, to methods and systems for resource load balancing in a conferencing session.
Description of the Related Art
Conventional methods for teleconferencing and video conferencing rely on either a central manager or peer-to-peer configuration. In a central manager configuration, all participant devices connect to a conference server or host central server that manages all media mixing and signal transmission between the participant devices. However, with the central configuration, if the host server goes offline, the conference session is ended. In addition, the host server takes on the entire processing load of conference data from the participant devices (limiting scalability) and must synchronize all participant devices. Furthermore, synchronization becomes more difficult as more participant devices are added.
In a peer-to-peer configuration, all participant devices are interconnected to one another. Each participant device may essentially maintain separate one on one connections to the other participant devices. However, similar to the central manager configuration, the peer-to-peer configuration is also not very scalable, as each participant device has to handle multiple concurrent connections.
What is needed is a method and system that efficiently manages data communication resource loads of participant devices in a conference session as well as provides system redundancy.